I like the Internets ... a lot.

September 2009

09/23/2009

This post is really a guide for a conversation Brad Kozlek and I are having with colleagues in our Consulting and Support Services group. The point of the meeting is to open new conversations related to the role of the centrally supported and managed personal webspace. Lots of what is here is being thrown out as conversation starters and not as an intended direction. It does represent a lot of the thinking I've been doing related to not the real time web we are coming to expect via new definitions, but more in the context of providing instant publishing options that are one button simple.

The One Button Web

While Anil Dash has a very interesting case for the Push Button Web, I am thinking about our ability to generate a One Button Web (OBW) here at PSU and encouraging thinking like this in education in general. I am going to define the OBW in our environment as the ability to publish content to the PSU webspace with little more than an access account, an active personal space, a blog, and the press of a button. With the bookmarklet approach built into the Blogs at Penn State we are so close. I think it is of critical importance that we empower personal publishing in as simple a way as possible.

When people want to share content across the web they do so with single clicks into social networks. The ubiqitous "share on facebook" links we see are changing behavior at an amazing rate. If you spend time in facebook or connected to twitter you have surely seen the incredible amounts of links, stories, movies, etc being shared within (and outside) the network. The people doing this aren't copy and pasting content, they are pressing buttons.

This behavior is important to understand. I'm not sure if this metaphor works, but we no longer tune our televisions to specific stations -- we press a button to get the desired results. In a lot of ways I think the ability to post new/original content as well as reposting content needs to follow that path. The personal higher education web has to get simpler and we should be thinking about how we empower that movement. The Blogs at Penn State sit on top of a powerful infrastructure that is centrally managed. Accepting the realities of the OBW is a critical next step in moving the potential of personal content management and portfolios in our spaces forward.

Our audiences should be using their own spaces to share into the social networks -- and I believe they will if we help them understand it. Nearly all of my content originates in one of my blogs and it sends it to Twitter and Twitter sends it to Facebook. That is critical because those other guys don't like to give my content back. If we make our spaces as easy as those other guys we have a huge advantage ... we like to give ownership and empowerment to our users -- we give their stuff back.

Everything is Miscellaneous

This leads me to another thought ... our audiences (by and large) no longer browse directory structures. They simply publish content into giant stores that they find again via structured or unstructured searches, through profiles, or in other similar user interface driven approaches that completely ignore where an asset is living. As an example, when a student uploads a picture to facebook they do it via a simple one button approach and they really don't care where it lives. They don't care because they don't need to. They are working to share that asset and it is tied to a greater representation of who they are, not based on a directory structure. They don't browse the directories to get the asset back -- at most they drag it out of the browser to the desktop, at the least they just leave it there. Why should we encourage them to care?

I think the answer within our environment is to let MoveableType be the gateway to our own implementation of the OBW. They log in via WebAccess to their dashboards to do all the same things -- share writing, upload files, and the like. Let the environment manage it. They don't care about directories and I think that is fine. I'm not saying we take away directory level access ... I am saying we no longer focus on it. Just a thought.

The rest of this post is really just a bunch of links as jumping off points for our discussion this afternoon ... most of it makes little sense outside the context of the face to face meeting. I am eager to hear reactions to the stuff above though!

09/14/2009

Say the word repository and watch any ed tech geek roll their eyes. Why? We've been there ... and not just once, but over and over again. Structured places to put things by a large community is tricky and very complicated business ... at least that's what everyone tells me. I've honestly not seen a repository that really seems to work. I guess there are lots of reasons for that and if you asked one of us who has been involved in a repository project we'd rattle of a dozen or more reasons for you -- people don't want to share, meta data is hard, the environments are overkill, blah, blah, blah. I'm not saying they aren't useful when you have very clearly defined goals and data. They get messy so quickly when you start to think about them in a general sense. With that in mind, I have an ultra simplistic thought that I want to throw out into the wild to see if I get a "you are crazy" style response.

For the past week or so a few of us in ETS have been taking part in a little experiment in multi-author activity blogging within the Blogs at Penn State to see if we could replicate the joy in sharing things quickly across the web into our own space. The idea is to do simple push button publishing, but instead of dumping it directly into Twitter or Facebook, we'd drop it into a common and simple blog right here in our own environment. We have been calling it, "Stuff" for no real reason. All it is a blog with a nice little push button bookmarklet that Brad Kozlek threw together for us. As you hit a site you highlight the text you want and press your "Stuff It" bookmarklet to post it. No different than the things lots of people do everyday with fb, tumblr, twitter, etc.

There are limitations, but they are easy to overcome. The first is that you have to ask to join and one of us needs to add you. We've already talked about how to overcome that ... and it is easy. Comments are a little limiting in that there isn't any layered social opportunity with them -- no rating and threading is a problem we'll also address.

These things aside, I see lots of potential. Here is the crazy idea -- why not just launch a blog that has features like this as a repository? Have something to share, use the bookmarklet to post it quickly. There is plenty of meta data for the built in search to pull from -- post title, body, tags, and categories would provide a great context for searches. In this scenario I am thinking it is 100% open with a CC attribution license on it so all content that goes in is sharable. If you wanted to provide something, just go and log in with your account once to add yourself as a member to the environment and you are good to go.

It gets even more interesting for another reason ... not only could you contribute content to this blog/repository space directly, but using tag aggregation within Blogs at PSU you could contribute to the repository by posting at your own PSU blog using a shared tag. That way one could make decisions about how content flows into the space. The past week or so working with the Stuff space I am seeing an even more powerful role for our publishing platform -- a platform that can actually host applications on top of it. Adding a simple self registration options provides us with a whole new piece of software that isn't really a whole new environment to manage. So that's it ... call me crazy, but would an environment like this give us something important?

09/09/2009

This past week I watched as older versions of WordPress were compromised. I was instantly concerned about my own installation as a few years ago my blog got hacked and someone embedded a whole bunch of pop ups to porn sites -- not exactly the kind of thing one likes to have attached to his name. In the most recent instance I was safe as I've learned to always upgrade my personal version of WordPress that I run here, but it got me seriously thinking again about why I feel the need to pretend to be a sys admin when all I really want to be is an author. That thought always leads me down a second path related to why would I want to press people at my Institution to do the same when we should be spending our time on teaching and learning.

These are different, yet related issues. I've convinced myself over the years that it is better to have total control of my online space than to hand most of it over to a company that would do it for me. I've blogged on my own domain since 2004 and its always just felt right, but it has not been without major headaches at times. I do it so I can manage my own plugins and use (and hack) my own themes. Now with that said, I am growing tired of dealing with any of it and the realization that this stuff is just not that secure is catching up with me.

I bang around with all sorts of tools and I end up liking a lot of them a heck of a lot better than I do my self-hosted WordPress install. I'm thinking of Tumblr, WordPress.com, and most recently TypePad as examples of places I think I would much rather be leaning on. The problem is that I can't help but worry about the overall staying power of these spaces. I want a space attached to my online identity that I control, so getting content out is just as important as elegantly getting it in. The big question is can I control my online identity (perhaps at my own domain) while leaning on someone else's infrastructure completely. Right now I don't run the servers that this site is hosted on and I don't write the software, but I do for some odd reason feel compelled to manage it all. If I were starting all over again today I wouldn't. I might pay for my domain and map a TypePad blog to it, but that's about it.

So if I follow this down the path towards the second part of my thoughts I need to ask if PSU should be playing in this game as well. The answer to that may be different than my own personal conclusions -- at the University we actually have system administrators who know what they are doing, we do run our own infrastructure, and we do have lots of smart people whose job it is to keep things secure. But still I must ask why not outsource it all and focus on the teaching and learning? We use MoveableType here at Penn State for lots of reasons, but one is the static publishing model into our personal webspace infrastructure. Could we envision a scenario where our students write at TypePad and publish their static files here? Other than the realities of authentication, infrastructure, and Institutional identity I can't see why not -- and I bet all of that is solvable. At the end of the day we want our students to have same goal I do -- to be authors.

With all that said, let's be honest -- rolling our own is always more fun. I'm just not sure I need to be having my fun in that way anymore. Confusing to say the least ... If I can get peace of mind at TypePad or WordPress.com then I may be on my way. If I can't you can forget it. I wonder what would happen if we asked our students and faculty the same question? I wonder how they would respond ...

09/05/2009

I have two older brothers. I don't see them much, as a matter of fact I don't really see them at all. They are really half brothers -- whatever that means. I guess what it means is that they are my Dad's children, but not my Mom's. I guess it also means its messy.

I'm on the verge of seeing my oldest brother, Donn, this weekend and I'm nervous about it. I've actually seen him before -- once in the last 25 years or so. A couple of years ago when Educause was in Seattle I took a cab out to his house and spent an evening with he, his wife, and his daughter. It was a difficult evening on lots of levels, an evening that really left me stunned and emotionally drained when it came to an end. At the same time it was an amazing opportunity to meet someone who was at once so much like me and yet so different. The thing that stands out the most is how after he dropped me off in downtown Seattle I stood and cried on the street trying to put it into perspective.

I've been here before. My other brother, Slade, has had a similar effect on me over and over again. While Donn has been consistent in his distance, Slade had for many years floated in and out of my life. It hit a high of participation in college as we were relatively close by -- he in Wheeling, WV and I in Morgantown, WV. I do remember a handful of really amazingly fun and emotional nights hanging out with him. Each sort of ending with the same promise that we'd be closer only to have us disappear from each others' radar for months if not years at a time. I miss him, but have no idea how to get back ... its been close to 10 years since I've spoken to him.

So on Sunday my brother, Donn, will be coming to see me right here at my own house. I feel the weight of the reunion and the pressure of making it right. Even with all the distance and lack of contact, he's my big brother. I guess I hope for once in my life that it lasts a little longer than in the past. We shall see, but I think I know how it'll go down.

09/02/2009

I just recently traded my small SUV in for a very nice used VW Passat Wagon TDI. I did it for lots of reasons, but the primary one was mileage. I wanted something that was more economical to drive than my old vehicle, but I also wanted it to be fun and functional. The Passat is all that.

The picture is obviously showing some serious milage and no, it doesn't look like that all the time. You can however find the exact spot to make it go from reporting the typical 28 mpg I seem to be getting in town to up into the 100s -- its fun to see even it is meaningless. I've not had it long enough to get through a whole tank of gas, but half way home and it is looking like it is going to be about double what I used get on a tank in my old vehicle around town. No idea on the highway, but I do very little of that kind of driving. Did I mention it is fun to drive?